Ex-spy accused in leaks had role in torture debate

This undated image, taken from video, and provided by ABC News show former CIA officer John Kiriakou interviewed on ABC's World News, Monday Dec. 10, 2007. Kiriakou, who told reporters he participated in the interrogation of terrorist Abu Zubaydah has been charged with leaking classified secrets about CIA operatives and other information to reporters. (AP Photo/ABC News)
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This undated image, taken from video, and provided by ABC News show former CIA officer John Kiriakou interviewed on ABC's World News, Monday Dec. 10, 2007. Kiriakou, who told reporters he participated in the interrogation of terrorist Abu Zubaydah has been charged with leaking classified secrets about CIA operatives and other information to reporters. (AP Photo/ABC News)
/ AP

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, right, accompanied by his attorney John Hundley, leaves Federal Court in Alexandria, Va., Monday, Jan. 23, 2012. In the latest criminal case in the Obama administration's effort to punish leakers, Kiriakou, who helped track down and capture a top terror suspect was charged Monday with disclosing classified secrets about his teammates to the media. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)— AP

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, right, accompanied by his attorney John Hundley, leaves Federal Court in Alexandria, Va., Monday, Jan. 23, 2012. In the latest criminal case in the Obama administration's effort to punish leakers, Kiriakou, who helped track down and capture a top terror suspect was charged Monday with disclosing classified secrets about his teammates to the media. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
/ AP

ALEXANDRIA, Va. 
Few people played a larger role in the public debate over waterboarding than former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who went public in a big way in 2007 with his descriptions of the waterboarding of a top al-Qaida leader in 2002. Much of what he said turned out to be wrong, he has since acknowledged.

Kiriakou is back in the headlines, this time after he was arrested and charged Monday with leaking classified details about terror operations, including the names of covert CIA operatives, to at least three journalists in recent years.

Kiriakou came to public attention in December 2007 when he was interviewed by ABC investigative reporter Brian Ross. He confirmed that the CIA had used waterboarding in its interrogations of Abu Zubaydah, who was captured March 2002 in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad and was believed to hold the No. 3 spot in Al-Qaida's hierarchy at the time.

As the CIA's director of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, Kiriakou had played a key role in Zubaydah's capture, Kiriakou wrote in his 2009 memoir, "The Reluctant Spy." According to the charges, the book was published only after Kiriakou persuaded the CIA that he fictionalized portions of it.

In the ABC interview, Kiriakou provided an explosive revelation about the Abu Zubaydah interrogation, which at the time was still shrouded in secrecy: He confirmed that Zubaydah had been waterboarded. And he said the waterboarding had been effective - that after just 30 to 35 seconds of it, Zubaydah gave up critical intelligence that saved lives.

Waterboarding is a harsh interrogation technique that involves strapping down a prisoner, covering his mouth with plastic or cloth and pouring water over his face. The prisoner quickly begins to inhale water, causing the sensation of drowning.

Kiriakou said he personally declined to participate in the waterboarding and expressed ambivalence about its use. But at the time, in the months after 9/11, Kiriakou said he believed the techniques were justified. Supporters of waterboarding used Kiriakou's comments to bolster the argument that it was an effective, necessary way to gain intelligence from terrorists.

But Kiriakou eventually was forced to admit that much of what he told ABC turned out to be wrong. The government later admitted that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded not just once, but 83 times. And in May 2009, an FBI interrogator testified to the Senate that claims by the CIA and the Bush administration that Zubaydah's waterboarding yielded important intelligence were false.

Some of the best information obtained from Zubaydah - which resulted in the arrest of "dirty bomb" plotter Jose Padilla and exposed Khalid Sheikh Mohamed as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 - was obtained under normal interrogation methods before the CIA even authorized waterboarding Zubaydah, the FBI interrogator testified.

In his book, Kiriakou said he hadn't expected Ross to ask him about Zubaydah. He said he thought the interview would include generic questions about the CIA's admission that it had destroyed some interrogation tapes.

In his book, Kiriakou says he wasn't present for the Zubaydah interrogations and relied "on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time. ... In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the art of deception even among its own."